This invention relates generally to social networking systems, and in particular to managing access to collections of content shared by social networking system users.
A social networking system allows a user to connect to and communicate with other social networking system users. A user creates a profile on the social networking system that is tied to its identities and includes information about the user, such as interests and demographic information. The increasing popularity of social networking systems and significant amount of user-specific information maintained by social networking systems make a social networking system ideal forum for users to share their interests and experiences with each other by uploading content for sharing with other social networking system users.
Conventional, social networking systems allow users to upload groups of content, such as collections of photographs, to be maintained on the social networking system and shared with other social networking system users. However, based on user-specific settings, such as privacy settings, different users may have different levels of access to content in group of content shared among social networking system users. Conventional social networking systems have limitations on privacy setting configuration that may prevent a user from sharing a complete photo albums with other users. For example, conventional social networking systems may prevent a user from sharing a photo album with users who are indirectly connected to the user; users directly connected to a user sharing a photo album using a conventional social networking system may have access to a greater number of photographs in the photo album than users having an indirect connection to the user sharing the photo album. Additionally, conventional social networking systems do not allow a user sharing a group of content to authorize other users to add additional content to the group of content or to manage user interaction with the group of content. For example, a conventional social networking system prevents a user sharing a photo album from authorizing other users to add photos to the photo album or to share the photo album with additional users.